[Ewe’s Milk Butter]

Every once in a while, life presents the gourmand with a scintillating novelty that tickles his curiosity with such insistence that he is left with the willpower of a charmed snake. So when I read about ewe’s milk butter in ELLE a couple of weeks ago (you would do well to keep an eye on those Vie Privée/Cuisine pages at the end of the magazine, they’re full of inspired ideas), it was all I could do not to run out and buy some.

But I was still in my pyjamas (I read ELLE at breakfast, there’s nothing like it), so I simply added the item to the shopping list that’s tacked on to the refrigerator door of my brain, waiting for an opportunity to visit the cheese shop mentioned as a source in the article. And sure enough, a few days later, I met with a friend for ice cream in that neighborhood, and after a chocolate-dipped visit to Patrice Chapon, we dropped by Nicole Barthélémy’s fromagerie.

Hers is a dollhouse of a shop in which you can’t fit much more than five or six human beings amidst the towering shelves of cheeses. Its posh location has earned it a following of assorted movie stars, and the prices have been adjusted accordingly, but I was willing to make an investment for the sake of research.

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[Chocolate Jelly with Pineapple and Violet]

This is the dessert I served to close my recent spring lamb dinner: it was a few days before Easter so chocolate was definitely in order, but since lamb shoulder is a rather rich cut (though I must note that French lambs seem to be much leaner than their American cousins; French Lambs Don’t Get Fat), I wanted to chase it with a weightless dessert.

Inspiration came in the form of a recipe card I’d clipped from ELLE. It was called Variation Poire-Chocolat, and it was one of Anne-Sophie Pic‘s recettes cultes (staple recipes): a milk-based chocolate jelly made with very little sugar, held together by the power of gelatin, and topped with slivers of vanilla-poached pear and crumbled sablés bretons — butter cookies from Brittany.

And somehow, as it moved through the folds and creases of my brain, her idea morphed into this one: pineapple instead of pears (it is the tail end of the pear season, and I’d found delicious small pineapples aptly named pains de sucre — sugarloaves), violet instead of vanilla (pineapple and violet have been best friends in my mind ever since I tried this bread roll), agar-agar instead of gelatin, and dried slices of pineapple (a riff on my dried pears) for crunch, instead of cookie crumbs.

It turned out that the recipe, as printed, didn’t make nearly enough gelée for four servings: I don’t know what Anne-Sophie feeds her guests before dessert (though I’d love to know), but mine need a little more than three spoonfuls each. So once I’d filled the glasses with a ridiculously thin layer of chocolate jelly, I realized I had to make a second batch. I was out of the 70% chocolate I’d used for the first, so I used a 55% for the second, and this produced a subtle, entirely serendipitous chromatic variation.

The end result was lovely, light and floral, the jelly offering just the right compromise between gelled and creamy. I can picture endless variations on that theme, using different seasonal fruits and flavoring or infusing the jelly with spices to match. But the real discovery here was the dried pineapple, crisp and chewy and sweet as honey. I had made more than I needed for this dessert — I wanted to make sure I had four attractive slices to sit prettily on the rims of the glasses — and we gobbled up the leftovers like candy the next day.

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[Avocado and Radish Canapés with Smoked Salt]

I’ve been on an avocado kick lately, and I blame my favorite produce stall for that: they keep running specials on them and really, who can resist a special on a trio of avocados when the stall keeper will hand-pick them for you so each will be ripe a couple of days after the previous one? (And since we’re on the subject of produce stall wonders, I’ve just discovered after four years of schlepping basketfulls of stuff from this one that they. will. deliver.)

So I’ve been on an avocado kick, and because the season of pink radishes is in full swing, I’ve been hung up on them, too. The classic way to enjoy pink radishes is to eat them with bread, butter, and salt, so I had this idea for a canapé: substitute avocado for the butter — what is avocado if not green butter? — and smoked salt for the ordinary salt.

Smoked salt, you ask? Yes, after trying Bordier’s smoked salt butter, I decided that I, too, had a right to play with smoked salt, and I bought a tub made by the Halen Môn salt company. This is potent stuff, the sort that should bear a little tag that warns, “Easy there, pal,” lest you get a nosebleed from breathing it in too sharply like my sister did when we were seven and eight and we tried to make ourselves sneeze with black pepper like Ma Dalton does in Lucky Luke.

But if you use it in a gingerly fashion, it lends an unusual note to whatever you sprinkle it on, a note I would situate somewhere between sapwood, burnt leaves, and moist earth, and this robust flavor profile engaged the sweetness of the avocado and the fruity piquant of the radish beautifully.

(If smoked salt isn’t readily available, a good old sea salt will do fine, with an optional pinch of smoked paprika. As for the toothpicked bites to the right, they’re sections from the dry sausages that hang next to the register at my butcher’s, rod-shaped and positively addictive.)

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Epaule d’Agneau Confite et Flageolets

Spring lamb is the traditional centerpiece of Easter Sunday menus in France: the agneau pascal symbolizes the sacrifice of the innocent, and the breeding cycles mean it is at its best this time of year, conveniently enough.

My family isn’t religious at all and the only thing we’ve ever commemorated at Easter is the invention of chocolate, but because Catholic traditions are so deeply rooted in France, they’re an integral part of the country’s culture, regardless of one’s beliefs.

Easter inspirations were thus on my mind when friends from San Francisco came to dinner late last week, so I decided to serve them a slow-roasted shoulder of lamb with a side of beans, lamb’s favorite playmates.

The lamb shoulder was ordered from Jacky the butcher (I requested that he leave the central bone in for flavor), rubbed with olive oil and dried herbs, and plopped in the cocotte and in the oven to reflect on the meaning of life (or, more amusingly, The Meaning of Liff) for four hours, a glass of wine in hand.

As for the beans, I had initially planned to serve the Rolls Royce of beans, but because I hadn’t planned far enough in advance to buy them at G.Detou, I had to look in my neighborhood, and found them at such an exorbitant price that I was tempted to lecture the shop owner about Greed, and had he not seen Seven?

Instead, I turned to the closest organic shop, where the young and friendly attendant seems to be munching on something every time I walk in (I have no grudge against gluttony), and picked up a bag of good-looking and more reasonably priced flageolets verts from Beauce.

The beans were cooked in the most straightforward way, simply simmered with onions in my second cocotte (I don’t know what I’d do without these two) and by the time they were done, the lamb was copper brown and spoon-tender, the juices and wine reduced to a syrup, and the cloves of garlic turned to butter in their papery sheaths.

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